Hybridizing Artifice and Nature: Designing New Soils Through the Eco-Systemic Approach

The chapter outlines the cultural background for applying design strategies consistent with the challenge of circularity. The contribution focuses on the ecological thinking as an effective design approach to produce and implement eco-innovative strategies able at facing environmental and societal challenges of our global age. Then the chapter depicts the Repair research experience in promoting a systemic design approach for recycling and re-using C&D waste as new, anthropogenic soils in Naples peri-urban areas. According to the EEA Report n.25/2017, the chapter posits that the major environmental challenges of the present are not about single issues, such as waste reduction or soil-loss, rather they involve systemic change and design processes, linking together economy, social habits and technological responses (EU, 2013). Therefore, the transition toward more sustainable urban metabolism deeply depends from creative visions by which breaking the circuit “take-make-dispose” and promote new - and somehow tentative - visions for implementing circularity at local and global scale. Further postulation in the paper is about assuming the concept of Anthropocene as theoretical ground for such eco-innovative design approach. The scientific evidence of living in human-dominated ecosystems makes designers toward a paradigm shift concerning the overcoming of the typical artificial/ natural dichotomy by exploring the augmented opportunities in designing sustainable and resilient habitats thanks to more collaborative, plural and innovative design approach: «What is important and significant here is how ecology and landscape architectural design might invent alternative forms of relationships between people, places and cosmos» (Corner, 1997 pp.42) Starting from these assumptions, the paper deepens the experience of collaborative design for implementing recycle and re-use of C&D waste for producing new technical soils, according to both the regulatory constraints (and potentials), and the site-specific features. The research goal is to provide new products (vegetated soils) by waste thanks to an innovative design process based on both circular economy principles and collaborative knowledge production. Notably, the capacity of producing creative hybridization between biotic and abiotic component seems to be the new frontier in the field of technological design and material engineering. The term hypernatural, proposed by Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer in 2015, introduces the idea of a co-evolutionary process between nature and science, looking at humans’ technological capacity as an effective opportunity for creating the conditions for making biotic ad abiotic systems working together: «The ultimate aim of technology is not antinatural: it is hypernatural» (Brownell & Swackhamer, 2015, pp.18). The chapter deals with the methodology applied for promoting a sort of protocological architecture (Burke, 2012), by which facilitating the C&D waste recycle and reuse within the construction sector, and notably into the landscape project. The research starts working under the H2020-Repair project, and it has developed within further research programs about C&D waste management in urban regeneration programs developed by the Department of Architecture of University of Naples Federico II.